I was a ‘book nerd’ not a cinephile, says Cronenberg son

Jay Stone, Postmedia News09.12.2012

Brandon Cronenberg, writer and director of the sci-fi movie "Antiviral," and son of the acclaimed Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, poses for a photo in Toronto on Friday, August 31, 2012. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Michelle SiuMichelle Siu
/ THE CANADIAN PRESS

Brandon Cronenberg, writer and director of the sci-fi movie "Antiviral," and son of the acclaimed Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, poses for a photo in Toronto on Friday, August 31, 2012. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Michelle SiuMichelle Siu
/ THE CANADIAN PRESS

TORONTO — There’s a new Cronenberg in town, and things are taking a turn for the infected.

Brandon Cronenberg is the screenwriter and director of Antiviral, which had its debut in Cannes and has now come to the Toronto film festival. They’re the ideal places for a futuristic sci-fi satire about celebrity, a story in which people are so obsessed by stars that they pay to be injected with their diseases.

Brandon, 32, is also the son of David Cronenberg, perhaps the most famous director in Canada, whose early movies also delved into the various nooks and crannies of the human body and its fluids, seeking metaphors for the human condition.

The result has been an explosion of Cronenbergitis, a condition marked by a cinema of hypodermic needles, blood, and lots of talk about fathers and sons. It’s a condition that Brandon takes with an admirable calm.

“It’s just the weird reality of having a famous parent,” he says. “It becomes entangled in their career or their public persona.”

It didn’t start that way. Brandon grew up as what he calls “a book nerd” who wanted to be a writer, or perhaps a painter or a musician. “I wasn’t a cinephile or anything,” he says, but as he approached his teen years, he began noticing that people assumed he must be.

Eventually it happened. “At some point I realized I could not do all that and be good at one thing. It was too scattered. Film is an interesting art form: it collects all those elements, visual elements, music elements, writing elements. It seemed like a good way to focus all that scattered energy into one thing.”

He went to film school, made some short movies, and then got an idea for his feature debut.

“I got very sick, and I was obsessing over physicality of illness and the fact that I had something in my body that came from someone else’s body. There seemed to be a weird intimacy in that connection.” He began to think of how it would be if an obsessed fan would actually yearn for that kind of intimacy by getting injected with a virus from a celebrity.

Antiviral depicts a world of contrasting clinical blankness and gritty back-alley realism, a symbol of the collision between the idealized celebrity world and the flesh-and-blood people behind those faces.

“I guess I was interested in that disconnect between celebrities as cultural constructs, as media constructs, and the human beings that these constructs are based on. The celebrities that are known by the world are pretty much fictions … Having in the film a certain contrast between the clinical, where the celebrities existed as these theoretical people, and then contrasting it with the meat and the bodily stuff, the animal stuff, is something I was interested in.”

Cronenberg knew more than most people how that kind of obsession works. “We would have certain actors over for dinner sometimes,” he says. “I didn’t get to know them extremely well, but you can see, when it’s right in your face, the disconnect between the way they are and the way they’re perceived in the public eye is very extreme.”

The result is a movie that stretches the modern tabloid culture. It’s about a company that harvests viruses, and where one salesman (Caleb Landry Jones) becomes infected by the rare, lethal illness taken from the most desirable celebrity of them all, the beautiful Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon.)

Just to close the circle a little more tightly, Gadon took the role right after playing a part in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, where she co-stars as the distant wife of a billionaire investment banker played by Robert Pattinson. In fact, Gadon met Brandon at the Cosmopolis party at last year’s Toronto film festival.

“As a person he’s so sweet, so smart, so grounded and unaffected,” she said in a separate interview. “As a director he had all those qualities, but he had such a quality of what he wanted and how he wanted to work. He’s so like his father in that way.”

Inevitably, some critics have seen Antiviral as a sort of David Cronenberg movie that just happened to be made by his son.

“Some of the comparisons are legitimate and some of them are hugely overstated,” Brandon Cronenberg says. One recent review called it Videodrome — the 1982 David Cronenberg film in which people get brain tumours from TV signals — but with viruses.

“I can see elements that are similar between the two films on a certain level, but it isn’t just that,” Brandon says. “It’s about something completely different. The tendency is to take those comparisons and really run with them. If I wasn’t his son I’m sure people could make some legitimate comparisons, but at the same time, I’m not sure it would be as central.”

It’s mostly people who don’t like Antiviral who dismiss him as “a lesser version of my father,” he says. But that’s the way it is when you’re the child of a famous person.

“I got to make a film. It’s a film I’m happy with. I think it accurately represents my interest regardless of what comparisons people draw, so I feel very fortunate.”

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I was a ‘book nerd’ not a cinephile, says Cronenberg son

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